Pages

Monday, July 9, 2012

Military Monday: Connecticut Soldiers at Antietam from Guest Blogger John Banks

Hi all,

I'm handing over the blog today to my first guest blogger. I featured John Banks and his Civil War blog in last week's Military Monday. Today, he's sharing his interests, his favorite research resources and some stories of Connecticut soldiers. I hope you'll take the time to look at his blog (http://john-banks.blogspot.com/).

-Bryna

It was a scorching hot summer evening and the air was thick as hominy grits as I slowly drove around Cold Harbor National Battlefield, near
Richmond, Va., two summers ago. Much of the great battlefield where men in blue
and gray killed and maimed each other in June 1864 is in private hands, but the
National Park Service-owned sliver, still pockmarked with trenches dug by soldiers nearly 150 years ago,
is very much hallowed ground.

It was at Cold Harbor that the 2nd Connecticut
Heavy Artillery, men from towns such as Litchfield, Waterbury, Goshen and
Norwich, discovered a hell on earth. On
June 1, 1864, the regiment suffered 85 killed and 221 wounded in an ill-advised
assault on Confederate breastworks. "You
cannot conceive the horrors and awfulness of a battle," wrote Chaplain Winthrop
Phelps of the regiment's first major battle. "I never wish to hear another much less
see it. I went out to see this but found myself in such danger I soon fled ...
Pray for me. I cannot write -- am not in a fit state of mind."

I can still recall the first time I saw the monument at Cold
Harbor to honor the memory of those men from Connecticut. As I walked ground that was heavily contested by
both armies, I came upon a small clearing where I discovered three blocks of light gray granite. Mounted to the
front of that 2nd Connecticut monument is a bronze plaque that includes names of Connecticut
men killed at Cold Harbor. When I read the
names aloud, hair on my neck stood up
and goose bumps covered my arms.

Like most Civil War battlefields, Cold Harbor holds a special
sway over the those like me who still hear the guns.

As darkness settled over the Virginia battlefield that
summer day in 2010, I met a local couple on a walk with their large dog. They said
they often walked the battlefield to enjoy the now-peaceful setting.

"This was an awfully bloody place," the man said
matter-of-factly. The woman nodded and then glanced at their dog.

"He often goes into the woods," she said, "to
chase the ghosts."

Chasing ghosts.

In an odd way, that’s an apt description of what I have been
doing the past 18 months.

My passion is the Battle of Antietam, where four regiments
of men and boys from Connecticut fought in woodlots and farm fields in Sharpsburg,
Md., on Sept. 17, 1862. Scores of soldiers from the 8th, 11th,
14th and 16th Connecticut regiments were killed or
mortally wounded during that battle -- the bloodiest day in American history. In the
days and weeks after Antietam, funerals for Connecticut soldiers were
common in the state.

"It is seldom that we are called upon to bury so many
braves in so short a space of time," the Hartford Courant reported nearly a month after the battle.

Of course, there’s no substitute for boots-on-the-ground
reporting at cemeteries. (Hmmmm, sounds a little strange, doesn’t?) For posts on my blog, I often
come up with good color by
checking out graveyards and gravestones myself.

Much of what I have uncovered is on my blog (John Banks' Civil War Blog http://john-banks.blogspot.com/),
which focuses on Connecticut, Antietam, Gettysburg and stories of common soldiers of theCivil War. Stop by for a visit or two or three.

Here are snippets of stories on my blog of 10 men and boys who were killed or mortally wounded at Antietam. Each deserves to be remembered.

Captain Frederick Barber,
16th Connecticut, Glastonbury

In the chaos of the 16th Connecticut's poorly conceived
attack at Antietam, Barber was pierced by a musket ball near the top of
his right leg. Like many other men, he soon took his turn on a bloody table for
surgery in a barn. A post-war account described Barber's gruesome operation in
cold, clinical language. "On the morning of September 18th, the patient
being anaesthetized by chloroform, Surgeon Melancthon Storrs, 8th Connecticut
Volunteers, proceeded to make a straight incision four inches long passing
through the wound of entrance," the report published in 1869 noted.
"The comminuted fragments of the neck and rochanter were extracted, the
round ligament was divided, the head of the femur was removed, and the
fractured upper extremity of the shaft was sawn off by the chain saw."
Translation: Barber's entire right leg was cut off. He died on Sept. 20, 1862.

Private Alvin Flint, 11th
Connecticut, East Hartford

Only 17 years old, Alvin joined the 11th Connecticut as a
private on Oct. 1, 1861. Less than a year later, he was dead, killed in the
attack near Burnside Bridge.The
loss was no doubt excruciating for 53-year-old Alvin Flint Sr., who had
enlisted in the 21st Connecticut along with his 13-year-old son, George, in
August 1862. In the winter of 1861-62, Alvin Flint Sr.'s wife and daughter died
of consumption in East Hartford. "Hardly had the sadness of the death of a
dear daughter, that I had lost last January, worn off when this sad, sad
calamity should come upon me," he lamented about his oldest son in a
letter published in the Hartford Courant on Oct. 29, 1862. Incredibly,
tragedy again visited the Flint family when Alvin Sr. and George died of
disease in January 1863.

Captain Jarvis Blinn, 14th
Connecticut, New Britain

Barely a month after he enlisted in the Union army, Blinn --
a man who had an "expression of quiet but earnest resolve tinged with a
dash of sadness in his air" -- was one of 38 men killed and mortally
wounded in the 14th Connecticut at Antietam. Moments after he was shot through
the heart, the 26-year-old captain shouted: "I am a dead man!"
A Hartford undertaker named W.W. Roberts brought Blinn and the bodies of
seven other soldiers killed at Antietam back to Connecticut in the second week
of October 1862. His funeral was held at Center Church in New Britain on
Oct. 14, 1862. Afterward, his body was escorted to Rocky Hill, about 10 miles
away, in "one of the largest processions ever seen" in New Britain.
He is buried near the back of Center Cemetery.

Private Robert
Hubbard, 14th Connecticut, Middletown

A 31-year-old private in Company B of the 14th Connecticut,
Hubbard was one of at least two soldiers in the regiment killed by friendly
fire on William Roulette's farm during the Battle of Antietam. Nearly a month
before his death, he wrote an impassioned letter to his brother. "Must it
be written that 360,000 slaveholders wielded such influence and power," he
wrote Josiah Hubbard. "as to destroy a government which can place a
million armed men in the field, and which has conferred greater blessing on its
citizens than any other that has ever existed since the days when God was the
direct ruler over His own peculiar people."

"I feel as if I could not forgive myself," Robert
concluded in the letter, "if this government should be overthrown and I
had no weapon in its defense." His body was
buried on the Roulette farm after the battle, and that December, farmer William
Roulette shipped the body back north to the Hubbard family.

Lieutenant George Crosby,
14th Connecticut, Middle Haddam

A student at Wesleyan University in Middletown before the
war, the 2nd lieutenant in the 14th Connecticut Infantry was mortally wounded
at Antietam barely a month after he enlisted. Thirty-seven days later, Crosby,
not quite 20 years old, died at home in Middle Haddam. "From the beginning
of the battle till he received his death wound, he fought nobly, encouraging
his men and leading them on," the Middletown Constitution reported
on Oct. 29, 1862. "And for a half hour after he was wounded, while he lay
helpless on the ground, without regarding his own condition, he kept constantly
exhorting his comrades to do their duty." His funeral service at Middle
Haddam's Episcopal Church was described at the time as "one of the largest
funerals ever attended in that place."

Captain John Griswold,
11th Connecticut, Lyme

Under fire from the bluffs above, the 25-year-old
captain boldly led a group of skirmishers across the 4-foot deep Antietam Creek
on Sept. 17, 1862. "In the middle of the creek a ball penetrated his
body," Griswold's friend, Dr. Nathan Mayer of the 11th Connecticut, wrote
in a letter from Sharpsburg to his brother on Sept. 29, 1862. "He reached
the opposite side and lay down to die." Griswold, who hurriedly returned to
the mainland from Hawaii to enlist in the Union army in 1861, died the next
day. He is buried in a small private cemetery in Old Lyme under a
beautifully carved 8-foot gray marker. Near the bottom of the memorial are
these words: "Tell my mother I died at the head of my company."

Private John Bingham, 16th
Connecticut, East Haddam

Only 17, Bingham was killed at Antietam a little more
than a month after he enlisted. Younger brother Wells, also a private in
Company H of the 16th Connecticut, apparently survived Antietam physically
unscathed, but the memory of that terrible day was probably seared into the
16-year-old boy soldier's brain the rest of his life. Three other Bingham
brothers served during the Civil War, including Eliphalet, who died May 1,
1864, in Virginia. John and Eliphalet are buried at First Church Cemetery in
East Haddam, about 45 miles southwest of Hartford. Apparently upset over a
failing business, Wells committed suicide in 1904.

﻿

Lieutenant Marvin Wait,
8th Connecticut, Norwich

A "brave, noble-hearted man and highly esteemed by all
who knew him," Wait, 19, was killed late in the afternoon as the Ninth
Corps made an ill-fated push toward Sharpsburg. "If Lieutenant Wait
had left the battle of his own accord when first hit in the arm, all would have
been well," Captain Charles Coit, also of Norwich, wrote after the battle,
"but he bravely stood to encourage his men still further by his own
example." From a prominent Norwich family, Wait had an large funeral that was
attended by the governor and other dignitaries. The young man who planned to
become a lawyer is buried under a beautiful white marker that includes the word
"Antietam" in raised letters on the front.

Private George Chamberlain, 16th Connecticut, Middletown

Wounded
in the knee in Farmer John Otto's cornfield during the Battle of
Antietam, George Chamberlain was eventually taken to the German Reformed
Church on Main Street in Sharpsburg for treatment. Like most churches
in the area after the battle, it was used as a field
hospital. Chamberlain's mother, Mary Ann, traveled from Connecticut to
Sharpsburg to help nurse her son back to health. "Present condition:
Wound from the entrance of a musket ball a little below the bend of the
right knee," a surgeon noted about Chamberlain in his case book " ... he
keeps the leg flexed at a right angle and is careful not to move the
joint for reason of pain." Chamberlain was discharged from the army
because of disability on April 1, 1863, but the wound suffered at
Antietam plagued him for the rest of his life. He died in Ohio on May
11, 1865.

Private Daniel Tarbox,
11th Connecticut, Brooklyn Conn.

In a letter to his father on Sept. 6, 1862, Daniel Jr. had a
sense of impending doom. "I expect we are going into it now for
good," he wrote from Washington. "Right where grape & shrapnel
and chain shot fly thick. And whole company’s and Reg’ts are mowed down at one
volley. If we go in, we can’t think of coming out. If I do fall, you take what
money I have sent home and get my bounty and appropriate it to yourself as a
present. But I hope for the best." Eleven days after he wrote that letter
home, Daniel Tarbox Jr. was mortally wounded near Burnside Bridge during the
Battle of Antietam. The 18-year-old soldier died a day later.